


what a tale my thoughts could tell

by lady_ragnell



Category: That Game We Played During the War - Carrie Vaughn
Genre: Chess, Epistolary, F/M, Injury Recovery, Post-Canon, Post-War, Telepathy, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:47:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28241862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Valk and Calla play chess, write letters, and discover life after the war.
Relationships: Calla Belan/Valk Larn
Comments: 9
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	what a tale my thoughts could tell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teethandstars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethandstars/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, **teethandstars**!
> 
> Title is, appropriately enough, from Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind."

Calla left confusion in her wake.

Valk, stalling the medication he knew was necessary but that he still hated, had hated from the moment the first sedative entered his system when he was captive, listened to it happen. She was a bubbling mass of emotion and thought, so much so that it was easier to listen to everyone else around her, the ones who'd seen her come in and the ones who hadn't, all of them with a shock of fear at her uniform, and then growing confusion at her thoughts of chess and Valk and the war.

And the peace. With the wry humor he'd come to know from her, Calla was thinking of herself as a one-woman peace delegation, an unavoidable window into an Enithi mind, one who obviously and truly cared for a Gaantish man. An ordinary woman, she might think herself, though Valk had never thought that, and the whole ward knew that now, and knew more about her, besides.

Before, at Ovorton, she'd pushed her thoughts away bit by bit, until they faded, and he could hardly hear them. By the time he'd sent her away, sick with fear for one prisoner who the hospital could have still used if she'd been given treatment, it didn't feel like a loss, because he'd been losing her by inches for weeks, and had foolishly only thought that she had been striving to learn the control any Gaantish child might.

Today, when her thoughts receded, it was with distance, and it happened quickly enough that he could feel the pang of her going. Valk was tired enough, had been happy enough to see her, that he couldn't control that swell of missing her. It would have given everything away, if she could hear him. It did give everything away to anyone who could, anyone who was curious about what the Enithi woman had had to say to Valk.

“Major,” said the nurse, sedative in hand, a wash of concern and sympathy and wishing he didn't need it almost as much as Valk did, and as Calla left his mind's reach, Valk sighed and settled and held out his arm.

*

The drugs were good, enough to keep him out of pain despite his knitting insides, and enough to make him wonder, for a heart-stopping moment when he woke in the night, if it had been real, if Calla had truly answered his telegram when he'd had no right to expect it, if she'd come and been so herself, if both of them had neither won nor lost their game but finished it nonetheless. He'd been clinging to the hope fiercely. It would have been easy to dream it.

One of the nurses, a different one, approached, all reassurance, already there with the drugs for the pain that had brought him awake. It was too late for verbal conversation, too many sleeping, but she gave him the impression of patients and doctors thinking about a black and white game board, about a woman in a gray uniform, about Valk and the one person he'd asked for since waking up in the hospital.

It had happened, and he didn't try to argue his way out of the sedation.

*

Valk woke in a foolish panic, enough of one to alarm the doctor on duty until he realized the panic was emotional, nothing about pain. “Technician Belan,” said Valk, a shorthand for the wash of emotions and thoughts about her as they crossed his mind. “She didn't say how long her visa is for, or where she's staying—”

She couldn't have come for one game, not when she'd been so happy to see him, not when she'd come at all. But they'd been so focused on the big things that she hadn't once thought about the small, and hadn't realized she hadn't thought of it so she wouldn't say it out loud.

And then reassurance, cutting through the concern from those of his fellow patients who were awake, some of them just as concerned that Calla might just disappear as they were for Varn's emotional health. She'd had that talent from the beginning: all the automatic care she gave, she inspired in others, when they thought to look. “I believe Technician Belan told the desk she would stop by again today,” the doctor said aloud. Some things were easier to believe when heard with the ears.

“When?”

“I can inquire, I don't know exactly.”

Someone, one of the men a few beds down, had the wry thought that it would no doubt be as early as Calla could manage, and there was a ripple of indulgent amusement when Valk relaxed at the very hope. One visit, and Calla had won them over. A one-woman peace delegation in truth.

“Do you think two Gaantish could play that game?” someone inquired out loud.

“We wouldn't even need the board,” said another, and the nurse on duty told them that nobody would be straining themselves with strange Enithi games until they'd had breakfast.

Calla came less than an hour later. A flutter of familiar anticipation, a few anxious inquiries to staff, the fractured memory of someone's kindness as she left the day before, _He usually has more energy in the mornings, Technician_ , and then she was in the doorway, already looking for him. The rush of relief and fondness and anticipation was so loud they must have felt it in the next ward, and Valk turned his head far enough to smile at her, and then again to smile at the nurse who was already moving the bed controls so he could sit up to see her.

“I didn't ask you how long you're staying,” he said as soon as she pulled the chair over. “Or where you're staying.”

Her mind produced immediate answers, the image of a dingy hostel room not far from the hospital, a return ticket to Enith at the end of a week, a longer visa than he might have feared so early in the cease-fire. “A week,” she said anyway, knowing he knew but saying it because for anyone else, she would have had to. “It was such a strange request.”

“Do you—that is, do you plan to do anything else while you're here?”

“What would I do?” she asked, puzzled, amused, a hundred other things so fleeting as to be dizzying. After her tears the day before, she was lighter, not healed but healing, and his presence helped. Anyone would say it was illogical, but it was true. Valk could feel the honesty in it. “I don't think your tourism industry is ready for me. And why would I want to leave you?”

Valk ought to tell her that there were museums, still, architectural wonders left standing against all odds, countryside not completely dug up, but he was too selfish for that. While she was there, he wanted to be able to see her. “Perhaps you'll be able to get another visa when I'm able to give you a tour of the city. I'd like you to see more of Gaant than Ovorton and here.”

“I'll come. If they let me. And maybe ...” But then Calla was remembering her walk through a train station, knowing people must be frightened and angry at the sight of her but spared the real thoughts, and thinking of Valk on an Enithi train platform, surrounded by hatred he could feel, insults he could hear even if the Enithi were too polite to say them out loud. “Well, maybe.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. Calla's presence, her brightness when he'd last seen her so helpless and shut off, made many things seem possible. “But for now, would you like to start a new game?”

Her mind was a hum of joy and strategy and the strategy of having none at all, and Valk felt attention all around the ward shift to her. He wasn't the only one who found chess fascinating, even as Calla thought with every move that it wasn't like the chess she knew. It was a game that might make a group of Gaantish soldiers seek out Enithi partners to learn the game themselves, to feel it from the inside and not from Valk and Calla.

She turned the white side of the board to him, and he moved a pawn and watched her mind bloom with possibilities.

*

Calla came every day as long as she was there, even when she had to sit and wait while he was being treated, while he was exercising as much as he could, while he was sleeping. That way, she played games of chess with three other patients on the ward and one of the nurses on her break. Valk was foolishly jealous of that, but that was easily assuaged by the clear fact that he was her favorite. She always brightened when he could give her time.

Of course, being Calla, she fell into assisting the nurses as well, and he asked them to let her be the one to dose him with the medications that would mean the end of each day together, and they sighed and allowed it, and he was grateful for the way she was glad every time to be useful, to be trusted.

The whole ward, except perhaps the more territorial members of the staff, came to like her very quickly. Valk wasn't the only Gaantish person who could be intrigued by her frankness, her loud and colorful feelings, the contrasts of what she said and what she felt. No Enithi could appreciate her in quite the same way, except perhaps the ones who played chess. They would see her determined cheer, her kindness, her willingness to help, but they couldn't see the mind that could take the movement of one small game piece and build out a future from it. They couldn't know how hard-won her cheer was, see the darkness beneath it.

“You'll miss Technician Belan when she goes home,” one of the doctors observed after she left on one of her last days. Not disapproving, but worried, certainly. Wondering if his patient would take a turn for the worse once his special guest had gone home.

“We hope that she can visit again someday soon.”

“I imagine so,” said the doctor, the worry growing and tinging with amusement at the same time, seeing something in Valk's head that Valk himself could not name.

*

On Calla's last day, Valk convinced the doctors to let her help him into a wheelchair to sit in the small garden the hospital could maintain. They had wheeled him a few times for more private meetings with specialists, so he knew it was possible, and his restlessness was affecting the rest of the ward, so they sighed and allowed it, and even if Valk hadn't been relieved to be outdoors for the first time since he was wounded, Calla's happiness would have been enough to make him happy.

They set up the board, but they didn't play. It was Valk's turn to play first again, after for once outright beating Calla the day before, but she didn't seem impatient for him to begin his turn. She tilted her head up to the weak sunlight instead, smiling to the sky, little in her head but uncomplicated pleasure.

Someone walking by inside caught sight of them, and had a jarring moment of fear at the sight of Calla's uniform, which seemed to be all she had packed. Perhaps all she was allowed to. The woman—a wife of one of the patients, it seemed—relaxed when she realized the tenor of Valk and Calla's feelings, and when she caught his eye, sent him an acknowledgment, wary but willing to allow that they might have reasons for genuine care.

Calla must have noticed her too, must have opened her eyes, because her thoughts began again, thinking of peace, just as hopeful as she'd been at the start of the week.

“What comes next, for you?” he asked, and feared it must be an abrupt question for her.

But Calla understood things she couldn't hear, at least when he said them. She wasn't surprised at the question, just thoughtful, smoothing down her uniform with the motions of long habit. Her mind was answering him with a flood of nervousness, of the smell of hospital, of a small apartment in Enith's capital. “I don't know,” she said out loud. “They still need me, like you need your nurses. But I don't know.”

To any Gaantish woman, the thoughts he had at that would have been embarrassingly forward. Calla looked at him and wanted some kind of sign. “I hope the truce holds,” he said. It was all he could manage.

“It has to.” Images of battlefields and field hospitals, and images of the view out the windows of the train, the devastated landscape that would take a generation to start growing crops again.

“Will you write to me?”

Letters from her mother, before they stopped. Letters from her squadmates, before they stopped. Letters that still came, some concerned about her, some talking to her as though the cheer she faked so well was somehow real. If she were Gaantish, she would have seen the echoes in his head, fewer and fewer letters as time went on, at least from people he cared about. “They'll read them,” she said, and then a twist of humor. “That's a very Enithi thought, I suppose.”

“Maybe. But even we like to trust privacy on the occasions it's expected. Does that mean you won't write?”

 _Oh, Valk_ , she thought, and there was a wave of wistfulness and amusement and leftover sadness as she smiled at him. “I'd be honored, Major Larn.”

They were almost in the center of the garden, and there were only a few minds that his could touch, but anyone who could hear would feel his relief at that. Instead of answering, Valk finally leaned forward, ruthlessly suppressing the twinge of pain in his gut at the movement, and moved his first pawn.

They played for almost an hour, until he was doing a poor job of hiding his pain and a passing nurse came out to fetch him, with a mind to scold Calla for what she couldn't possibly know. Valk requested that he not, and asked Calla to push him inside, keeping his hands on his lap and trying not to let his pride be hurt.

“We could keep playing,” he offered, to the nurse's disapproval, but he could already hear that Calla wouldn't allow it. Another game unfinished.

That was her intention, though, he realized from her rush of thoughts. It was the closest to a promise she could get when neither of them knew if the peace would hold. “Next time,” she said, and then grinned at him. “And in the meantime, maybe you'll learn real chess. People play it by mail, you know.”

“I'll look forward to learning.”

*

Calla stayed another hour, while the staff hovered, wanting him to admit he needed medication and sleep, that he'd had enough adventure for the day. He had, but Calla was there and the deadline on her visa, the time on her train ticket, were both looming closer, until she finally sighed and stood up. “I have to go. Try to keep yourself in one piece, Major. And—please do write.”

“You first, so I have your address,” he said, though even saying that brought the numbers and the street up in her mind.

Still, she smiled at him. “As soon as I'm home.”

“Thank you.” He reached out and caught her hand, and couldn't help noticing just how many people noticed when he did. It made his stomach hurt worse, but it was the first time they'd touched without her adjusting his blankets or giving him a dose of medication since she'd arrived. They could notice all they liked. “Technician—Calla. I'm glad you came.”

He'd thanked her before, for everything she was and tried to be, for all her thoughts, and she hadn't known what he meant. She still wasn't sure, but she wondered if it was a reflection of her own hopes and thoughts. “Thank you for asking me to come,” she said, and picked up her chess set and left.

Once more, he was left feeling her mind recede down the hall, pain and loss and hope and always, always humor. He'd never known anyone who could laugh at herself as much and as often as Calla did.

A nurse appeared with a syringe, and with more specific sympathy than usual, the thought of a beloved husband at home and the pang of a missing mind when they'd been assigned to different places during the war. “It will be easier after you've had some rest.” A gentle lie. Valk smiled and accepted it and closed his eyes, feeling Calla slip out of reach.

*

Her first letter came almost immediately, and began _I can't wait until I'm home to write you, so I'm writing from the train._

Most of the first page was taken up with a description of the scenery that was passing outside the train window, the parts she found familiar and the parts she didn't. _The old battlefields, of course, are familiar_ , she wrote in one parenthetical, but she didn't expand on that part, and he didn't really want her to.

The second page, when he reached it, was devoted to a diagram of a chess board, labeled on the sides with numbers and letters, and a description of how to notate the moves he wanted to make, and interpret the ones she wanted to.

 _Now you'll have to learn strategy the old-fashioned way,_ she wrote after that, and then after a few skipped lines: _g3_.

“What do you need, Major?” asked the nurse who Valk was hardly aware of having asked for.

Valk smiled, a little sheepish. “I wonder if I could get some cardboard, pens, and scissors? It seems I'll be continuing to play chess.”

*

_They let me walk a few steps today,_ Valk wrote two weeks later. Letters from Calla arrived nearly every day, and he responded in kind with little else to occupy him as they weaned him off the sedatives, even if the speed of the mail meant they could only exchange chess moves every few days, and his improvised set, even clumsier than the one she'd made at Ovorton, was more a visual reminder than anything else.

 _More every day,_ he continued, _and soon they think I'll be able to go home. Or to leave, at least. The cease-fire holds, but no one is willing to trust it. Technically, I will remain on medical leave until doctors clear me, but I don't know if I'll be decommissioned, just as you don't know if you will be. I have a small apartment in the city, but you know how much of my life I've spent elsewhere. I don't think it even has curtains._

_You have a useful occupation, beyond the war. I'm still unsure of mine._

Valk frowned at his board, set up with the moves already made. _Nc6_ , he wrote at last, and sealed it to send.

*

It was harder to play chess without her mind to reflect his strategy back at him, hard enough that Valk was chagrined about it, and admitted it in letters.

 _I have to admit that I feel some satisfaction about that,_ Calla wrote on a beautiful spring day when Valk had walked up a small set of stairs and was barely winded from it. The doctors were talking about his release within a week. _Besides, now you're getting the chance to see what a good player I actually am._

Her move, taking one of his pawns with one of hers and leaving it free to be taken, had made him work to imagine what she might have been thinking, as she set it up, what traps she might be laying. The whole ward had been listening as he thought it through, and had been all along, and they all had opinions on the matter, but they left him to make his own decisions about play.

 _There was a peace celebration the other day, when the first group of soldiers was decommissioned_ , she continued, with no more to say about their game of chess. Their letters were getting longer every day, and chess took up less and less of them, even if they both still loved the game. _I went with some of the rest of the staff from the hospital, just to see all the color in the streets, the festival outfits people hadn't worn for years, bunting hung out on the streets and in front of the shops. I spent more money than I should have buying trinkets. I was looking for a chess set for you, but I couldn't find one I liked, and anyway, Gaantish security will let me through with chess sets, and that's very different to letting one through without me to explain it. The letters will have to do for now._

And then, a page later: _They're talking about making almost all the medical workers civilians again. Let the hospitals pay us as they can, even if our patients will still mostly be soldiers. I can't say I'll miss the uniform, or the potential danger. But there are some things I'll miss. Isn't that strange?_

*

_I don't need a chess set of my own, Calla. I'm happy to wait for yours._

*

Valk could have been discharged as soon as he woke in the hospital on his last day there, but the doctors seemed to have one thing and another to do to check him over, and it was transparent that they were waiting for mail call. He'd written to warn Calla that he would be changing addresses, giving her his new one, as soon as they'd told him, but it had been short notice. A letter or two might still go to the hospital first and have to be forwarded.

A nurse brought the letter with his discharge and with the lecture about coming for his follow-up appointments and taking care of himself delivered half in his ear and his head. Valk wanted, foolishly, to open it before he left, but he took it with him instead, to the relative privacy of his apartment.

He'd spent most of his adult life at war, surrounded by people, often people in fear and pain. The apartment building was small and at the end of a quiet street, so his mind brushed fewer than he was used to. It was as unnerving as it was a relief, he decided, and took out Calla's letter to read.

It wasn't as good as hearing her thoughts, it never was, but it still made him feel more at home.

*

_You say so much more in your letters than you do out loud. Maybe you're saying everything I would be able to know if I were Gaantish. You must hear less from me than you do when we meet. It's strange for both of us, maybe, but I like getting to know you this way._

_I'm out of uniform now, and I feel much more free. The work is the same, but maybe it's that I know the new patients who come in aren't being hurt on the front lines. The other day I had a woman who climbed a tree to fetch her son's kite and fell out and broke her arm. I almost started crying. Good thing the doctors here don't know when I get close to that! They'd lose all respect for me. Though I suppose you never did. You weren't a doctor, though._

_I'm glad you're settling in at home, even if you feel you don't have much to do. You're a war hero. Aren't they going to start parading you around to talk about peace? I've been looking forward to seeing Major Valk Larn in the papers._

_I saw a Gaantish man hurrying through the town the other day, and he looked like he was being stabbed in the skull, but I still wished he was you. Do you think while they're parading you around they'll send you to Enith? I know it wouldn't be easy, but there's a park where some older people sit sometimes and play chess together. They're much better than I'll ever be, especially if you keep ruining my strategy, and I think you'd like to listen in. I asked one of them, when I passed through, why they'd decided to begin. She said that people would do it before the war, and that it's time they did again. I agree._

_And speaking of chess: checkmate. Check your board, if you don't believe me. I knew I could beat you if we played properly. Now it's your job to beat me. I'm resetting my board, and it's your turn to start._

*

_When I get your letters, I sometimes wonder what you were thinking that you didn't say, as you wrote. You're right to say that I miss being able to hear you. But your letters make me feel anything but deprived. I just hope that my company doesn't make you feel deprived. With more time in your company, I hope I'll get more used to speaking out loud._

_They've started reaching out, asking me about interviews and medal ceremonies and being present for treaty negotiations. They should have you there. You're the one who makes peace._

_I don't know if I'll come to Enith, or if they'll want me to—anyone but you, I should say. But I'd love to walk through your park, and to listen in on other people's games. To listen in on you while you play someone worthy of your skill, because I don't think you'd do as poorly as you think you would. It would be nice to experience that while I was fully awake._

_I didn't need to check. You'd had me in check for several turns, and I'm still learning. I'm happy to try again, though: d4._

*

“Technician Calla Belan,” said Valk in a meeting, the first doctors had reluctantly cleared him to attend with the city's local generals. He was still leaning on a cane sometimes when the pain took his legs out from under him, but it happened less every day. He might never fight again, not the same way, but he would move without pain, and he would live, the doctors implied, as long as his sense allowed him to. “To invite here with the delegation.”

They had heard the name. Some of them had probably read samples of her letters, looking for some kind of code in the chess notation. Others had likely been the ones to approve her application for a visa to visit him. And those who hadn't been involved in either could see, in rapid succession, Valk's history with her, his fondness for her, the letters they exchanged, and always her thoughts of herself as a bringer of peace, and Valk's agreement with them. “A nurse?” one of them asked. “This is a political event.”

 _I tell stories about you whenever anyone seems to disapprove of the peace, or be scared of the Gaantish_ , Calla had said in a letter weeks before, when he was newly returned to his apartment. _I couldn't tell stories about Ovorton, even if you were as kind as you could be then, but I could tell stories about visiting you, and chess. I hope I can make them less afraid._

They all heard the memory, saw the crisp folds of the paper and the movement of her bishop. Valk spoke anyway. “She's contributing materially to the peace. She doesn't have to sit in the meetings. She shouldn't sit in the meetings. But if enough people can hear her, maybe they could begin to understand.”

“Understand what?” another general asked, and Valk was glad that he didn't have to put his answer into words.

*

_I'm not much of a gardener. You would think that since I can care for people, I could care for a few flowers, but it turns out it's not true, perhaps because of how many hours I spend at the hospital. But today, the seeds I planted and shoved on my windowsill when I got home from visiting you bloomed into flowers—while I was at the hospital, of course. If I were any kind of artist, I would draw you a picture, but you'll just have to imagine them, bright yellow and orange. There are vegetables in the shops too, when I go. It's a beautiful summer in Enith. Is it in Gaant?_

Enith and Gaant were neighbors, without a mountain range or an ocean between them to significantly change the weather from one place to the other, but after Ovorton, Valk knew that was a question Enithi asked each other. They asked about the weather, or the season, and they meant _Keep talking to me_ or _We're in this together_ or a thousand other things.

 _It's a beautiful summer,_ he wrote in response. _I don't have plants of my own, but I wish I could see yours. We also have vegetables in the markets, though. The doctors are allowing me to go for longer walks outside my apartment, longer every day now. Maybe I'll try one of the parks soon, and see if they've planted flowers again._

He didn't ask what he wanted to ask, if she'd been invited as part of Enith's first real peace delegation as he'd suggested. The generals hadn't invited him for a meeting in a while, so they must be thinking.

 _Check,_ he said for lack of anything else to add to his letter once he'd made his move, and folded it up to send.

*

Summer was almost over before she mentioned it. It was at the end of a long letter, where she'd written about patients, about going out dancing with some of her fellow nurses from the hospital, about the last few moves of the chess game they were finishing.

 _Are you the one who did this?_ she asked, and it was like she was in the same room, because he knew what it meant before he read on. _The delegation is going to be there for six months. Are you sure?_

Valk could perhaps have felt guilty for arranging it without asking her, but she didn't seem upset about the invitation. She would have said a laughing no, perhaps next time, next year, when everything was more sure. Calla was never afraid of saying no to him when she needed to.

 _Yes and yes,_ he wrote at the beginning of his own reply. _But only if you want to come. If it sways you, this time I can meet you at the train. I can't come to Enith yet, but if you want to come back, I'd be glad to see you._

In a move she no doubt thought of as justice, and was right to, he heard her ultimate answer when he was finally called for a meeting with the generals again, to discuss the slate of events he would be expected to attend. It was just the edge of a thought that told him, a _But of course you'll be busy with Belan,_ amused and a little exasperated, and then more of both when Valk failed to control his reaction.

“They considered it an odd request, but perhaps not as odd when we reminded them she was one of the first to visit after the cease-fire,” one of them said, more amused than exasperated and also knowing in a way that made Valk feel like a child when he was anything but. “She'll attend the less official events. I assume for the rest of the time you'll take charge of her.”

Six months with Calla, where she was free to go where she pleased, where he was her guide but not her keeper. He would be feeling as healthy as he ever would, after the war, and at the end, if all went well, there would be peace. Freer travel between their nations.

“That's decided, then,” said the general in charge of the meeting, and they moved on telling Valk his duties, which all seemed much easier when he knew Calla would be allowed to come along.

*

When he sent the telegram, he had no way of knowing if she would come, if she _could_ come, and he'd been too tired to anticipate her arrival much anyway.

When he knew she was coming, that it would only be a month or two, Valk found himself jittery with nerves. They finished their game of chess, Calla winning again, the window into her mind not quite enough strategy for Valk to beat her yet, and she began another that he could barely concentrate on. Valk spent days with the generals, talking about Gaant's military future and his own future, when they all knew he wouldn't be effective on a battlefield anymore but had no training for anything else. He spent days with the press, talking about peace and chess and the delegation.

 _The hospital doesn't know what to do with me when I'm leaving for six months,_ Calla wrote when he gave in and told her he was glad she was coming. _I don't know what to do with myself either. I thought after Ovorton that it would be enough time away for a lifetime, but this time I'm excited to go. I want to see more of Gaant than prisons and hospitals._

Valk, in his reply, was as honest as he could force himself to be: _I haven't seen much more of Gaant or Enith than you have. Not since the war started. Hospitals and prisons. An apartment that doesn't have much more in it than your hotel room did when you came to see me. But I'll take you where I can._

He would have given almost anything to hear her thoughts when she read those words, but he contented himself with the written reply to that, underlined for emphasis: _I want to see it all._

*

_I'm leaving tomorrow, and I travel slower than the mail does, so maybe I can say this, and I won't be thinking about it so much so everyone in Gaant can hear our private business. But I will be thinking about it, so if you weren't, maybe now you can be too._

_Valk, I'm coming to Gaant, because you asked for me again. How long am I staying?_

She was right to ask the question in a letter, because his reaction alarmed a neighbor as she cooked her dinner, and he had to apologize and withdraw to his bedroom, farther out of her range. It was something he'd considered, when asking her to come, but nothing he'd dared let himself think seriously about, or hope for. Calla, more than most, had every reason not to want to come to Gaant to stay. She might find herself fading away again, and he wouldn't keep her there if it made her so unhappy.

If she left, would he go with her? Could he live in Enith, with thousands of minds that didn't know how to keep him out? Maybe for a while. Maybe, in the end, it would mean going from one place to another as long as they could.

But whatever he tried to think, he couldn't imagine letting her go after six months.

*

The train platform was full of people gawking on the day the Enithi delegation came.

Valk stood with the rest of the military part of the receiving party in a freshly-pressed uniform and looked out over the crowd. Gaant had been slower to decommission its military than Enith, but still, where a year before it would have mostly been soldiers traveling, the crowd was dressed well, in colors he hadn't seen in a long time, wrapped up in jackets and hats against the autumn chill, craning their necks for the train.

As soon as it pulled in, Valk could hear them all, and could hear the flinches in the minds around him as they braced for it. Suddenly, it was easy to recognize the soldiers, who knew what to do, who had heard Enithi minds fearful or angry or dying in pain on the battlefield, and those like Valk, who knew them in prisons. There were a few minds, even, who were more welcoming, looking forward to the delegation with something like anticipation, and Valk looked for them automatically, and found that at least one was a nurse from the ward, one who'd played half a game of chess with Calla while Valk had been sleeping.

He saw Valk looking and gave him a brief smile, but the train doors were opening, and all forty-something of the Enithi delegation were coming out, beginning with the most important politicians and continuing from there as the most important Gaantish stepped forward to greet the first few. The press was taking pictures, and Valk tried not to peer, but knew that more than a few people were paying attention to his distraction, noticing that he was waiting for someone.

Calla left the train in a knot of secretaries and spouses, who were all giggling nervously in a group. From the fading images and words in their minds, Calla had just been speaking to them, telling them not to be nervous, telling them it would be fine. As she left the train, though, there was only one thought in her mind, like a bullet traveling from her to him.

Valk had a moment to register that he'd never seen her out of uniform, that green suited her, that her hair was a little longer, before he started moving, almost without thinking. No one who heard his thoughts or Calla's would blame him for deviating from the plans.

When Calla spotted him, he had a disorienting moment of seeing himself through her eyes as she cataloged the changes since she'd last seen him, in pain and recovering. The uniform gave her a split second of a turn, but she saw his face and everything was relief and joy and knowing, and Valk could put a word to what he couldn't before, what seemed impossible with all the hurt between them, but what was nonetheless true.

“Welcome to Gaant,” he said as he closed the last of the distance between them, more for the Enithi who were watching them, curious and worried, than for anyone else. Everyone Gaantish would know what he was feeling as loud as a shout.

Calla wasn't Gaantish, but she knew too, had learned to read him in ways she hadn't before they started writing letters. The word wasn't in her mind, only the feeling, but she'd heard what he said, and what she heard underneath it was _Welcome home_.

Her arms around him were strange and new, but Valk held on, and felt certain of something about his future for the first time since the war.


End file.
